


each one so heavy, each one so cumbersome

by tomato_greens



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: M/M, endgame jack/bitty, weird bad sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-07-16 17:57:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7278115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Jack had bad sex and one time he had okay sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I'm sorry for asking, but please come take me home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> ETA: although I don't read this as dub-con, someone asked me to warn for it!

Halfway through the third time they fuck, Kenny clutches Jack’s wrists together and tightens his heels around Jack’s hips. They’re in Kenny’s bedroom at the Gauthiers’ house, where Kenny’s been staying since they started playing in the Océanic. It used to be basically personality-less but it’s filled up with Parse, now, hockey gear stowed everywhere and dirty clothes tossed towards the basket in the corner. Kenny’s calloused toes catch on Jack’s leg hair, which is disgusting, and his pale eyelashes flutter as he gasps, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Jack doesn’t know whether he should try to kiss Kenny or focus on aiming his dick or what, and Kenny’s no help, eyes still rolling back into his head and his hands in a vice grip around Jack’s. God, Jack’s already exhausted just looking at him. He wonders vaguely if Kenny’s faking it—sex doesn’t feel that good. 

“Fuck, yeah, you’re so hot in me, babe,” Kenny hisses in his ear, breathy so it sounds like porn. Jack doesn’t know if he’s doing it on purpose, how he does it at all: Jack learned to jerk off silently in his billet families’ guest rooms or showers and it’s been a hard habit to break. “Fuck, Zimms, Zimms,” Kenny pants. 

Jack feels weirdly self-conscious on Kenny’s behalf, like he should shut him up or something. “Yeah, I’m here,” Jack grunts, trying for sexy and missing. He braces his hands on either side of Kenny’s shoulders. The position makes him think about the time the assistant coach made them hold planks for five straight minutes. The whole time the coach kept shouting, “You can do anything for five minutes, ya pansies!” 

“Faster, come on, Jack, come on,” Kenny begs. Seeing him writhe is as surreal as it was the first two times. Kenny’s an athlete, the best Jack knows. He almost never moves without purpose. “Jack,” Kenny insists.

“Okay,” Jack says. He starts counting his thrusts. Five quick, four slow, three quick, two slow, one quick, and repeat. Kenny seems to be enjoying it, anyway, as long as he isn’t faking it. Jack still can’t tell. His arms start to shake so he gets down on his elbows. The angle’s a little worse but at least he’s not going to collapse on anyone.

“Oh, oh, oh, oh,” says Kenny, and sinks his teeth into Jack’s shoulder. He always fucking does this and it hurts Jack’s shoulder like hell, not that he’d ever say anything to Kenny—he doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, and Jack’s an athlete, too. He knows how to take a little pain. “Oh my god, I’m—” Kenny says. He clutches Jack’s wrists harder. That hurts, too. “Give it to me, give it to me,” Kenny breathes, and comes.

“Yeah,” says Jack, because he wants Kenny to know he appreciates him. Kenny’s come is all over their stomachs now, in thick strings; Jack mostly likes making Kenny feel good but he doesn’t love cleaning it all up afterwards. A necessary evil, he guesses. 

“Come on, come on,” Kenny says, clearly coaxing. His feet have let go of Jack’s ass, thank God, but he’s still trying to direct Jack’s speed by pulling on his hands. “Keep going, come on, come for me, Jack, come on, you’re so good, come for me, come on—”

Kenny likes porn a lot more than Jack does, which is probably why he’s so much better at the dialogue part of it. Jack doesn’t really love being talked to like he needs minding but it clearly turns Kenny on—even now, minutes after his orgasm, his face is all screwed up in pleasure. Jack’s never taken it up the ass, though, so maybe there’s something he’s missing. Suddenly he feels his hips seize and that’s it, it’s over, he’s coming, finally.

“Oh, Zimms,” Kenny sighs, petting Jack’s hair back from his forehead as Jack pulls himself out. He peels off the condom and fumbles it, almost spills his come all over the bed. “Thanks, bud. That was awesome.” He kisses Jack’s nose and takes the condom, throws it into the wastebasket next to his nightstand.

“Yeah,” Jack agrees. “Awesome.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fic title from Julien Baker's ["Sprained Ankle"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmGVIvf8Q6s); chapter titles from her song ["Go Home"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxTjko70fBg); the _Sprained Ankle_ LP is devastatingly good, I super recommend it.
> 
> you can find me talking about #traumz on my [tumblr](http://tomato-greens.tumblr.com) or chatting in a much less uncomfortable fashion on my [fanblog](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com)!


	2. a strung out call I make

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA: although I don't read this as dub-con, someone asked me to warn for it!

“Still good?” Kent asks, removing his mouth from Jack’s dick with an obscene pop.

“Yeah,” Jack says. He actually doesn’t love getting head, but Kent’s pretty good at it; Marie-Claude, who broke up with him six months ago, had always treated his cock like it was vaguely distasteful, would very delicately take it in her hand when he was about to come and catch it all in a paper towel she’d prepared beforehand. Jack couldn’t fault her efficiency, though it was always a little clinical for him. Kent’s too slobbery but at least he’s enthusiastic. 

“Cool,” Kent says, and kneels back down. He takes one of Jack’s hands from its grip on Kent’s bathroom sink and puts it in his hair, then tightens one of his own hands around Jack’s balls until it hurts, which isn’t unusual: Kent’s basically the love of Jack’s life but he always fucking hurts him. “Câlisse,” Jack says involuntarily. 

Kent pulls off again. “Mr. Zimmermann! I’ve been in Quebec long enough to know that’s  _ rude _ .” 

Jack wants to say something funny back. He used to be better at this, he thinks. Lately he seems to think slower—not on the rink, usually, but the rest of the time everything feels about three steps removed from where it should be. “Yeah, well,” he settles for. 

“Glad to see you’re too distracted to think of a witty comeback. You might’ve hurt my feelings.”

“Chirp, chirp,” Jack offers, and Kent snorts and kisses Jack’s hip before getting back to business. 

Sex with Kenny is louder and funnier and weirder and a little more violent than it is with anybody else, which only makes sense since Kenny is louder and funnier and weirder and a little more violent than anybody else Jack knows. And Kent isn’t even violent, not really—not the way Jack feels, somewhere underneath his anti-anxiety meds and Kent’s hand on his cock and making a tough shot after a perfect assist, a clawing desperate endless anger. Kent’s aggressive on the ice but not with his fists. Jack doesn’t start fights either, but he seems to attract more of them. 

Kent twists his balls harder. “Tabarnak!” Jack hisses. The remaindered syllable echoes off the tile wall, a little:  _ ak ak ak.  _

“Tell me how you really feel,” Kent mumbles, smiling against his dick. He’s half-hard again. When they first starting fooling around, Jack had envied Kenny for his short recovery period, but now he’s kind of grateful he only has to be responsible for coming once. Kent kisses him on the tip and then rubs his face into Jack’s hip, moving one hand up from Jack’s balls to pull sharply at his pubic hair and the other to start pulling on his dick. “Come on, sweetheart, I know you like it like this, I know you need it like this, come on—” 

Sometimes when Kent does this he pulls Jack’s hair straight out of him. It stings more than Jack likes it to. Well, Jack doesn’t really like it to sting at all, but Kent loves it, so it seems petty to split hairs, ha ha. 

“Babe, come on—” Kent sighs, starting to sound frustrated. He plays it too fair to come twice before Jack’s come at all, but he clearly wants to get a move on. 

Jack focuses back on Kenny’s fist around his cock. It’s hot; objectively it’s hot. It feels good. “You feel good,” he grunts.

“I know I do,” Kent says, not even a little bit of irony, “so come on.” He gives Jack’s balls a little slap, which is pretty new. Jack doesn’t know how he feels about it, but he must like it because it startles him into climax. “Yeah, babe, yeah,” Kent says, and draws his wet fingers up Jack’s chest as he stands and kisses him. 

“Thanks,” Jack says.

“You don’t have to thank me,” Kenny laughs, and takes one of Jack’s hands to put baldly on his cock. “Though I’d sure appreciate it.”

“Anything for you, honey,” Jack drawls, feeling his whole attention snap to Kent and his blonde wiry hair and the way it frames his dick. Suddenly he also feels an acid anticipatory bubbling in his chest. Well, tabarfuckingnak. Almost time for another Xanax, but Kent worries when he’s reminded that Jack gets anxious so he’ll have to sneak the pill later. 

Kent groans and pulls at the back of Jack’s neck so they can kiss, breathe into each other’s mouths, kiss again. He likes it sweet; Jack’s tried pushing him around before in case he was trying to teach Jack by example or something, but he always backed off and frowned, so then Jack figured he only liked doling it out. That was fine. Jack liked giving Kent what Kent wanted, and Kent liked taking what Kent wanted. Talk about compatibility. 

“Fuck!” Kent breathes out, and then he laughs and says in his terrible joual, “Baptêche, ostique, batarnak!” 

Jack doesn’t know why he always minces his oaths in French when he says “fuck” with wild abandon. Maybe because he learned most of them from Mrs. Gauthier, who’s too classy to full-out swear when she drops a glass or stubs her toe. 

“Oh, Jack, fuck, I love you, I love—” Kenny says, and comes.

Kent taught Jack that turnabout was fair play, if no one else did. “Love you too,” Jack answers, kissing him before taking a fingerful of Kent’s own come and dabbing it on his nose. 

“Oh, dude, gross!” Kent wrinkles up his face and squeezes his eyes shut, so Jack kisses his eyelashes too. “Get me a washcloth, that’s disgusting.”

“Yessir,” Jack says agreeably, and reaches behind himself to turn on the faucet.


	3. I've kissed enough bathroom sinks to make up for the lovers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warnings: anxiety, canon-typical drug use
> 
> ETA: although I don't read this as dub-con, someone asked me to warn for it!

“You’d like it if I came on your face, right?” 

It’s a completely surreal thing to hear in his bedroom in his parents’ house alongside the same fucking Sidney Crosby posters he taped up in fifth grade, and Jack doesn’t love the feeling of come drying on his stomach so he can’t imagine it would feel a lot better tacking up his eyebrows, but Parse looks pretty excited about it. Jack nods. “Yeah, probably.”

“Let’s get this spark back in our relationship, huh?” Parse says, and laughs like he’s tired, but of course the draft is in less than a month and they’re both pretty beat. He palms the nape of Jack’s neck in the warm way he’s done since they met at fourteen, years before they kissed or fucked. Jack feels a little better about the idea of a dirty face as long as Parse keeps touching him like that. 

Jack needs another dose so he kisses Parse on the side of his face and says, “I just gotta piss—then you can spark on me all you want.” 

“Go get ’em, tiger,” Parse says, and claps Jack on the shoulder. As far as Jack knows, that’s how it all started, Parse’s sex thing where he likes slapping Jack around: like cellies or locker room friendly shit, except in bed. Makes sense, if you think about it long enough.

So Jack heads into the bathroom and digs his Xanax out of the drawer, pops three with a handful of water from the sink. He was feeling pretty shitty this morning before Kenny came over, so he looks at the bottle of Ativan tucked haphazardly underneath the bag of Q-tips and sticks one of those under his tongue too. Better to cover his bases; he hasn’t had an attack in front of Parse in a almost a year and he wants to keep it that way. Crying like that is fucking embarrassing.

“Jaaaack, finishing washing your goddamn OCD hands and get back in here,” Parse whines through the door, so Jack turns off the faucet and sets his shoulders and comes back into the bedroom, where Parse is pantsless and flung across Jack’s bed like a fainting Victorian lady in one of Jack’s mother’s historical romance novels. 

Oh, for crissakes. Sometimes Jack wishes he weren’t such a fucking dweeb. He pinches the thin skin of his wrist and climbs on top of Parse.

“Did you not flush, you freak of nature?” Parse asks, maybe annoyed, maybe not. Fuck, fuck, what if he gets into the bathroom next and sees that Jack didn’t piss at all? Then he’ll know—shit— 

“Not my fault you zone out whenever you’re naked,” Jack snaps back.

Parse rolls his eyes and pulls Jack down to him. “Calm down and kiss me,” he orders, which is one of the two things Jack does well. He doesn’t really want to go first in the draft but he thinks going second might kill him. Fuck. Maybe he’ll take another Ativan whenever they’re done here. “Come on, put your back into it,” Parse says, definitely annoyed now, and Jack does what his therapist taught him before he and his dad decided he really needed that extra hour of practice: he imagines taking the dark cloud of his anxiety and shutting it up in a box. Then he sticks his tongue directly down Parse’s throat. Parse pushes him off—“You’re a fuckin’ animal, Zimms”—but he’s grinning now, so mission accomplished. 

“At least I’m not the one into bestiality, then,” Jack chirps him, but he can feel himself smiling, too, and all of a sudden he’s back in his room kissing his best friend on the jaw, and he’s overwhelmed by how lucky they both are. 

Kenny sticks his hands in Jack’s hair, tugs on his shirt, kisses down his neck and then along his collarbone through Jack’s cotton V-neck.

“You know I can’t really feel that, right?” Jack asks, his tone a little drier than he wants it to be but not actively objectionable. 

“I’m enjoying myself.” He tugs at Jack’s shirt again, and this time Jack takes the hint, pulling it off, though Kenny briefly traps him while his face is still covered by shirt and kisses him hotly through it. 

“Oh my god, let me breathe,” Jack finally says, his voice all muffled.

“If you really want to,” Kenny agrees, then whips Jack’s shirt the rest of the way off. Jack can feel that his face is flushed, but the way Kenny’s touching his chest means that it’s probably gone all the way down. Usually Jack gets embarrassed by how obvious he is. Maybe he doesn’t need the second Ativan after all. Kenny wraps him up in his arms, for once not constricting him, just holding him in place while he kisses the shit out of him, and it’s great, fuck, it’s great, what the hell does Jack worry so much for anyway? It’s all great.

He pulls off sloppily, a string of spit still connecting them. “You’re great,” he says, dumbly thrilled and in love, fuck, “I love you.”

“Love you too, baby,” Kenny says, liquid, tender. “Come on, let’s swap.”

Jack shifts his weight so Kenny can climb on top of him and flip him the rest of the way. Kenny’s not small, not really, a hair under 5’10” and as able as Jack is to bench press 150, but he’s narrow—lithe under Jack’s hands. Kenny kisses and kisses him, and like Polaroids Jack watches Kent’s hands reach his neck, his arms, his hips, his dick.

Warmth spreads up through his cock to his spine and then shoots up to his shoulders, which suddenly relax down into the bed. “That’s more like it, Zimms,” Kenny says to Jack’s hard-on, the funniest fucking thing Jack has ever seen, “take a load off, more like shoot a load off—” and then he stutters with a delighted bark of laughter as Jack comes. “Eager for it today, huh?”

“Guess so,” Jack says. His body is a soft and malleable thing, and not even the come leaking down the cut of hips into the comforter can bother him or tighten him back up. A guitar string cut loose, not that Jack’s ever had the time to play an instrument. 

“My good boy,” Parse adds. He’s got that fucking raptor smile on, the one that looks like he knows something Jack doesn’t. 

“I’m not anybody’s good boy,” Jack grumbles.

“Sure you aren’t,” Parse says, and he pulls one come-slick finger up to trace something on Jack’s chest. K-E-N-T. 

Most of the time that shit gets on Jack’s nerves, but today he’s already a soft thing and the idea of belonging to Kenny just makes him fuzzy-headed and softer. “Sure I’m not.” 

“Falling asleep on me?” Kent asks, one hand definitely on his dick if  the rhythm of his ass bouncing on Jack’s thighs is anything to go by. “I guess you’re a real boy, now, Zimms, napping after coming and everything.”

Part of Jack wants to open his eyes as wide as they can go, throw Kent on his back and push his whole hand inside him, but the rest of him is too serenely comfortable. “Are you going to come on my face or what?”

“Hold your horses, asshole. And open your goddamn baby blues, I’m not a somnophiliac.”

“You been reading the dictionary?” Jack asks, using his hands to prop his eyes open unnaturally wide.

“Oh my god, stop it, you’re going to give me an anime fetish or some shit,” Kenny moans, propelling himself forward in a wild thrust in time to get come in Jack’s eye.

“Fuck you!” Jack yells, laughing and wincing and sort of wanting to throw up. Kent’s hand comes down on Jack’s cheek, and for a second it’s hot as hell, Jack wants to bite his wrist, but then he rubs his come into Jack’s stubble. “ _ Stop _ ,” Jack insists. 

“Fine, you baby,” Parse says. He leans down and kisses Jack on the corner of his jaw. “Let me get you cleaned up, baby.”

Jack doesn’t think he scratched a cornea or got come in his brain or anything, so he closes his eyes again and listens to Parse wash his hands. He comes back with a warm towel that he uses to wipe Jack’s face down. 

“Hey, no, I can—”

Parse puts a hand over Jack’s mouth. “Let me do this for you.”

Jack subsides; it’s out of love; it feels like love. Kenny draws the washcloth down Jack’s face and belly, little pools of warm water gathering in the valleys between Jack’s muscles before evaporating and leaving vaguely itchy skin in their wake. He takes special care at the corners of Jack’s eyes. 

Eventually Parse takes away the washcloth and gives himself a quick swipe, then lies down behind Jack and gathers him up like he’s in pieces. It’s fine because it’s love. Being taken care of is supposed to be a nice thing, Jack reminds himself.

Parse kisses the back of his neck, but Jack can barely feel it; fuck; he can’t breathe; what if Parse goes first? What if he does?

“Babe,” Kenny whispers, “I can feel your heart going a mile a minute, you gotta calm down. You gotta breathe—you need me to—”  

“Just gotta piss,” Jack says, and gently dislodges Kenny’s arms before clambering out of bed. 

Kenny won’t let go right away, looks over Jack critically—the way Parse looks at the ice. But Parse never smiles at approaching D-men like he’s smiling at Jack right now, like he too feels a fuzzy burr of affection in his chest.  Jack’s not sure they weren’t made for each other, really. “Again? You have, like, no bladder.”

Jack can’t even come up with a response so he shrugs and tugs his hand out of Parse’s. He doesn’t turn the light on, closes the door, sits down on the tile in front of the sink. He opens the top drawer and gropes around for the bottle underneath the Q-tip pack. 

What if he doesn’t go first? What if he does? 

He feels like his whole rigid body is shut up in cotton balls, like they’ve been stuffed in his mouth and ears and between each of his fingers and in the negative space around his cock. He unscrews the child safe cap and sticks a pill under his tongue. He trembles in the dark. He can’t hyperventilate or Parse will hear, so he breathes in through his nose (1, 2, 3, 4) and out through his mouth (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

A knock on the door. “Jack, babe, you okay in there? I don’t want—it’s just that you’ve been in there a while."

Jack stands up. The roiling in his body has subsided although the cotton balls are still there, but that’s nothing new. He turns on the light and flushes the toilet, because you can’t say he makes the same mistake twice, and opens the door. “I’m fine, Kenny,” he says, and smiles down at him. Game on. 


	4. I haven't been taking my meds so lock all the cabinets and send me to bed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: canon-typical drug use, homophobic language
> 
> this should really count as chapter 3.5

Two weeks after Jack politely refused his mom’s offer to move him into Xavier Hall and then had a horrible screaming fight with his dad, he and Shitty have their first real conversation in a basement party that Johnson literally dragged them to. “Trust me on this, the narrative needs a catalyst here,” he’d said, and pushed empty Solo cups into both of their hands. “Drink what you want,” he said, nonchalant, winking at Jack, “but I just know you guys will get along.” 

“What a guy,” Shitty says an hour later, waving expansively with the hand holding a joint. Weed has never been Jack’s favorite, but he’d never turned it down, before: it’d always mellowed him out, made him pull Kenny into his lap without worrying about who was looking at them or whether Kenny was just humoring him. Shitty must notice that Jack can’t stop staring at the sinuous arcs of smoke because he waves the joint in Jack’s face and offers, “You want in?” 

Jack thinks about it—being normal, for once, not worrying about whether he’ll end up choking on his own vomit on a bathroom floor for a second time—but he shakes his head. Anyway, weed probably doesn’t mix well with Lexapro.

“Eh, to each his own,” Shitty says, and takes another hit. 

Samwell looks like a film set, all nineteenth century brick and red-gold maple trees, so usually Jack feels like he did when he first got to rehab: like someone was going to pop out of a panel in the ceiling with a camera and a dunce cap labeled ZIMMS. This crummy living room is definitely real, though, even if it’s only obvious because of the little puffs of plaster that rain down on everybody whenever the dancing gets too enthusiastic. And Shitty, sitting comfortably on the horrifying carpet next to the only-slightly-less-horrifying green couch, seems even realer. His eyes are very bright.

“So what’s it like to be a living legend,” Shitty muses in Jack’s direction, then winces and reaches up to pat Jack’s face. “That didn’t come out the way I meant it to, sorry. Far be it from me to ask about the psychological ramifications of lifelong fame, you know? I have my own shit. Forget I asked.”

Normally Jack is compelled to play this stuff off—it’s fine, I’ve been very lucky, my support network is great—but instead he finds himself shrugging. “Okay.”

“Okay, like, it’s okay being Bad Bob’s kid, or okay, like, you’ll forget I know who your dad is?” Shitty’s voice is as relaxed as his body language. His eyebrows are pretty high up, though. Alert. It feels like he’s giving Jack a pop quiz. 

“It sucks,” Jack shocks himself by saying, “a lot of the time it sucks.”

He waits for Shitty to roll his eyes, but instead he just bumps Jack with his shoulder. “Poor little rich boys gotta stick together, bro.”

Jack huffs out a laugh and waves his hand at the joint. “Gimme some of that.”

“Pushy, pushy.” He hands the joint over as easily as he seems to do everything else. 

Jack sucks the wrong way and frowns down at the little roll of paper before his muscle memory kicks in and he takes a hit. Some part of him expected it to taste different, but it’s the same as it usually is, maybe a little smoother than the crap that got handed around when he was seventeen. Jack’s never been a connoisseur; weed was never his drug of choice—ask him about benzos and he could probably write a fucking thesis. 

He hands the joint back over. “I’m done. I don’t need any more.”

“The famed disciplinarian returns, I see,” Shitty says, but then he jostles Jack’s shoulder like he’s letting Jack in on the joke.  
“I am who I am,” Jack answers, which is true, he knows it’s true, so it’s not a surprise when another twenty minutes pass and his hand’s migrated to Shitty’s knee, then his hip.

“Is this going where I think it’s going?” Shitty asks, his joint long gone now, his own hand resting on Jack’s pec and a speculative quirk to his eyebrows. “Were all the rumors true?”

“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet,” Jack says, and leans forward to kiss him. “This is okay, right?”

“Uh, I think Jack fucking Zimmerman putting his tongue in my mouth is going to be just fine,” Shitty laughs. 

Something about that strikes Jack as—not what he wants—some weird tone in Shitty’s voice like he finally remembered who Jack’s dad is, but Shitty’s eyes are bright and his thigh is warm under Jack’s hand and Jack hasn’t so much as hooked up with someone since he got sober, and he’s been lonely long efuckingnough. So he leans forward and kisses Shitty again, just another stupid college kid at a stupid college party, and Shitty’s hand comes around the back of Jack’s neck to stroke it. All of Jack shudders in response. A welcoming. A cupped hand under a faucet, or some symbolic shit like that.

“I don’t usually go for dudes but you’re a motherfucking good kisser, you know that?” Shitty mumbles eventually, clumsily patting Jack’s cheek while they come up for air. 

“He was taught by the best,” says Kent Parson, standing behind the couch with his hands on his hips and a backwards snapback. Jack shoves Shitty away and turns to look up at Parse, his whole body immediately and instinctively ready to flee or fight. “Hi, Jack.”

Jack can’t speak. Parse reaches down over the back of the couch and offers him a hand. Jack takes it before he thinks better of it, then flushes all over, resentful: how dare Kenny come here and pick him up off his own team’s floor? “What are you doing here?” he asks, and he knows already that he sounds sullen and too young, like they’re seventeen and Kenny’s shouting at him, waving the empty Xanax bottle in his face while Jack promised he knew what he was doing. Jack didn’t know what he was doing then, obviously, considering what happened the next year, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing now. “Aren’t you busy fondling the Cup?” Parse looks taken aback, hurt. Jack had forgotten how big his eyes can get. Fuck. “Sorry,” he says, and covers his face with the hand that Parse isn’t holding.

“Are you fucked up?” Parse asks. His voice cracks in an incredulous shriek. “Jack, what the fuck—”

“Calm down, man, it’s just weed,” Shitty says.

Parse’s face turns vicious. “Yeah, and how would you know? Come on, Zimms, let’s get you out of here—” He puts his other hand on Jack’s shoulder as he starts to come around the couch. From far away it probably looks like a fucked up foxtrot.

“Don’t touch me like that,” Jack finally manages to say.

Parse releases Jack’s shoulder but when he tries to tug his hand away Jack’s fingers won’t let go. “You’re kind of giving me mixed signals here, bud,” Parse says, sounding young like Jack just did, and god, Jack’s fucking up again, here’s a chance to fix it all and he isn’t.

“I know,” Jack admits. He sounds plaintive, which is pretty embarrassing. 

“Come outside,” says Parse.

“Okay,” says Jack. “But Shitty has to come, too.”

“Whoa, Jack, you don’t have to bring me into this,” Shitty starts, but Jack grabs his shirt and Shitty sighs and shrugs theatrically, and they trail Parse out into the parking lot, where a low-slung Ferrari is parked haphazardly in front of the sagging porch. 

Jack squints at the car. Philip Pritchard waves at him, buckled in next to the goddamn Stanley Cup.

“Kenny,” Jack says, and drops both Shitty’s shirt and Kent’s hand.

Shitty sidles behind Jack and runs back inside the Haus. Given how loud the air around Jack’s head seems to be crackling, he can’t exactly blame Shitty for retreating as soon as he could, although his absence feels tangible, like a support crumbling from beneath Jack’s feet. 

He should have remembered: he always gets melodramatic when he gets high. It’s one of the reasons he doesn’t do this kind of thing anymore.

“Zimms,” Kenny says, voice soft, face softer, reaching out to clap one hand around the back of his neck. Jack slits a glance over at Phil Pritchard, but Phil’s looking out the other car window, clearly giving them space. Anyway, he must have seen worse in thirty years of Cup celebrations.

“Why did you do this,” Jack mumbles. He wants to look Kenny in the eyes but he can’t. “You know I can’t—you know I didn’t—”

“I just wanted to share it with you.” Kenny puts their foreheads together like the cover of one of the romance novels Jack’s mother eats up during the summer, and then their mouths are so close that it makes no sense not to shift his weight forward and kiss.

Kenny kisses back the way he always kisses back, generous and a little sloppier than Jack likes it, his hands traveling up to cup Jack’s face. They’re calloused and warm, the tendons sticking out in a bas-relief: he’s always been naturally slender but he must have lost a lot of weight in the postseason.

“We shouldn’t be doing this out here,” Jack says when he backs up for a second. His mouth is slick. He wipes it off.

“No,” Kenny agrees, his eyes crinkled up. “That’s what makes it fun.”

“Can I see it?” 

“Yeah, Zimms,” and Kenny leads him over to the car, knocks on the window so Phil will roll it down. Jack leans in close enough to breathe in the Cup's air, although he’s careful not to touch it. He feels hypnotized, and then grabs one of Kenny’s hands through the car window with him, manipulating his fingers to trace along one edge. 

“You need some alone time?” Phil offers, looking uncomfortable. He’s looking over Jack’s shoulder at Kenny.

“I think we’ll be okay,” Kenny assures him, and pulls his hand back, brings Jack along with him. “You wanna go back inside?”

“Yeah, okay,” Jack says, and Kenny thanks Phil, wraps one arm around Jack’s shoulders and walks him through the chaos of the party, past Shitty, past Gunny and Potzer and the rest of them, and brings him upstairs where he shoves him onto his own bed and then roots around in Jack’s pocket for the lock. He comes over onto the bed and pulls down Jack’s fly as he grabs Jack by the throat.

“You need me to rough you up a little, huh?” he says, and gives Jack a little shake. “You always used to want that when you needed to calm down.”

To his own horror, Jack feels his eyes well up. “No,” he whispers. 

Kenny either doesn’t hear him or ignores him, tightens his grip and grabs his wrists. Jack feels a hole open up in his chest; it’s going to be like it was before, after all: Kenny’s hands warm and tight and unwelcome. 

“No,” he says again, louder. “No, I don’t want that.”

Kenny lets him go and backs up on his knees, staring at Jack. “But you always—”

“No!” Jack repeats. “I’ve never fucking liked it, okay?”

Kenny’s whole face goes white and he climbs off the bed. Even though he’s taller than Jack like this, he looks tiny, his shoulders shrunken and his postseason frame delicate. “What?” 

“I know that it turns you on, but I’ve never—”

“It doesn’t turn me—Jack, no, I could tell you liked it, you always let me—you wanted—”

“I fucking didn’t!” Jack shouts. “I didn’t! I never asked, I never wanted, you always just took it!”

Kent shakes his head. At first his expression looks like disbelief, but then it hardens, angers. “I can’t believe this, you complete asshole,” he snarls.

“What?”

“You fucking—I come here to try and give you something you can’t get for yourself and you turn it all around, like I’m the one hurting you—”

“Well, excuse me, you piece of shit—”

“I’m just trying to help you,” Parse says, and that’s it, it’s the last straw; Jack zips up his fly and grabs Parse by the collar. “Let go of me, you psycho,” Parse is yelling, but Jack’s not paying attention, dragging Parse down the stairs. Between them, Parse might be the professional athlete, but Jack’s still got thirty-five pounds of muscle on him.

“Holy shit, Jack,” Shitty says as he rounds the corner towards the front door. “Fuck, Parson, are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

Jack shoulders Shitty out of the way and heaves Parse out onto the porch. Parse takes a few shaky steps back and grabs onto one of the nearly-rotten posts to get his balance, then loses his grip and actually falls the rest of the way off the porch.

“Fuck you, you cocksucker,” he yells.

Jack stalks out onto the porch to look him in the eye as he says, coldly, “I don’t ever want to talk to you again, you condescending piece of hypocritical shit,” and then he stomps his way up to his room, locks the door, turns off the light, and presses his face to the floor as his whole body starts to shake.


	5. my body is just dirty clothes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA: although I don't read this as dub-con, someone asked me to warn for it!

“You guys don’t need to do that,” Jack says.

Ransom holds up his hand. “Need? No.”

“But want to,” Holster adds, hooking one hand on Ransom’s shoulder, “absolutely.”

“Seriously, though, Jack, it’s our duty to find you someone to—”

“Winter screw,” Holster finishes, wiggling his massive blond eyebrows.

Jack tries to make himself say it: No. He feels his mouth shape, “Okay,” instead.

“Trust us,” Ransom and Holster promise in unison, producing a matched set of finger guns.

Jack rolls his eyes. He quirks his mouth. “Sure, guys.”

Ransom scrunches up his face and simpers, “Atta good captain,” which is how Jack knows he fumbled his way through the right script.

And objectively speaking, Camilla Collins is hot. Jack can get it up for girls, mostly, and when she grabs his hand and jerks her chin towards the Haus, he can tell he’ll be able to get it up for her; she’s got blonde hair and a trim waist he can fit most of his hands around. He wishes he didn’t have a type—it seems so demeaning, reducing people to their lowest common denominators—but it is what it is. She’s hot. He’ll be fine. 

“Come on, come on,” she says, almost feverish, tugging him upstairs and crowding him into his bedroom once he unlocks the door. Jack’s never really understood how frenetic everyone gets about sex, why everyone seems to think it’s so different from jerking off. An orgasm is an orgasm, right?

She gives him a little push and he topples over onto the bed. Something that feels like a hot bubble bursts in the center of his chest when she climbs on top of him, but he ignores it in favor of helping Camilla get his pants off. “I’m so glad I wore a skirt,” she says, and quirks a grin at him. 

“Oh yeah?”

“The better to you fuck you with, my dear.”

Jack huffs out a laugh like he’s supposed to and reaches underneath the skirt to pull off her bright green underwear. It’s got cute little frogs on it. “Nice.”

"Hey, I’m not judging how boring your plaid is,” Camilla points out, and pats him twice, right on the dick. Jack’s body starts to curl up in reflex, but Camilla’s in the way. “Although, speaking of, let’s get these off.” She kneels up again, taking her weight off his hips, and tugs at his boxers until he lifts his ass and lets her pull them down past his knees. He kicks them off because he doesn’t want his ankles to get stuck or tangled up in the leg holes. Camilla sighs as she sinks back down onto him, rubbing herself, stickily wet, against his dick. It feels pretty good. Mostly things that involve touching his dick feel pretty good.

Camilla grabs one of his hands and brings it under the skirt. “You’re not into kissing, are you?” she asks, with her mouth in a moue of distaste. “I feel like dudes always want things to be so fucking romantic, and I’m like, no thanks.”

Jack shrugs. Kissing’s all right, but she’s the one on top. Plus he knows from a lifetime of lectures given by coaches and health teachers and, horrifyingly, his dad that it was easy to take advantage of women, that he should always let them set the limits. 

“Yeah, you didn’t seem like the emotional type. It’s why I wanted to come to Screw with you,” Camilla says conspiratorially. She rubs herself against his hand and shudders. “You have condoms?”

“I—don’t know,” Jack admits. “It’s been a while.”

Camilla shrugs and says, “I can be inventive,” before she crooks his fingers up and sinks down onto two of them. She’s hot and wet inside, and the hard bump of her clit bumps up against the heel of his palm. He presses up into her until he feels fleshy ridges on the front wall of her. “That works,” Camilla huffs. “Come on, crook your fingers—no, don’t pull them out again, just leave them in.”

Jack rubs inside her and she groans, leaning forward and pinching her own nipple through her shirt. He tries to help her out with his free hand, but she slaps his fingers away. “I got this. You just keep doing your job down there.” She readjusts her weight and pushes on his wrist to get him farther in her until he feels enveloped in strange, pillowy warmth, his index and pinky fingers bent uncomfortably forward. 

“Fuck, fuck me,” she says.

“I’m trying,” Jack says.

Camilla’s eyes are closed and she doesn’t respond, jerking herself further into his fingers. From the underside her breasts are so pale they almost look blue. “Fuck,” she says again, and jackknifes around his fingers as her body tenses above him. It looks almost uncomfortable, her shoulders hitched up around her ears and her fingers holding onto his wrist in a vise grip. She pulses so hard around him that she almost pushes his fingers out. 

He makes to remove his fingers but she refuses to let him. “Don’t you dare move,” she warns, attacking her clit with a renewed fervor. “I’m almost—I just have to—” 

Jack doesn’t know how to help her and he can’t reach his dick, so he just sits there and watches. She makes little squelching noises every time she adjusts his fingers, and when she comes a second time he feels her drip down his wrist. 

“Nice,” she says, pulling herself off his fingers. They’re very wet. 

“Thanks,” says Jack. He’s still hard but he doesn’t really want to touch himself with her still all over him. 

Camilla’s looking down at him with a dutiful expression. “How do we want to do this?” she asks. 

“Whatever you want,” Jack promises, because it seems impolite to kick her out.  
Camilla shrugs and starts jacking him off. It’s mostly dry and uncomfortable, but it’s nothing Jack can’t manage. 

“Man, you’ve got some stamina,” Camilla says about ten minutes later. “My wrist is starting to hurt, Jesus.”

“You can stop if you need to.” Camilla immediately lets go and shakes her wrist out. “Maybe if you lick your palm,” Jack suggests.

Camilla wrinkles her nose delicately.

“Or you don’t have to,” Jack rushes to say. His neck feels hot and the whole world has spiraled into a tight focus on his dick. He wants to go to bed. “I’m gonna run to the bathroom.”

“Have fun in there,” Camilla offers, and flops back on his pillows.

Jack shuts the bathroom door and stares down at his dick. It looks like it normally does when it’s hard; red, leaning a bit towards the left. He stands above the toilet, spits on his hand, and palms himself, trying to get close so Camilla won’t have to work so hard. Then he comes by accident, which would be embarrassing if it weren’t such a relief.

He flushes his come down the toilet and heads back out into his bedroom. 

“Finished so soon?” Camilla asks, her eyebrows raised. 

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” she assures him. She picks her underwear up with a foot and brings it up to her hand in one flexible stretch, flashing him with her patch of dark blonde hair; she skims into it, wriggling as it reaches her hips. “I was getting tired anyway.”

“Me too,” Jack agrees, and then asks, because his dad told him to, Jesus Christ: “You want to sleep here?”

Camilla shakes her head and pats him on the shoulder. “You keep your tiny bed all for yourself.”

“Thanks.”

She stands up and pats her hair back into place. “See you around, Zimmermann.”

“Yeah,” Jack agrees, and lets her out, locking the door behind her and smelling his own fingers for a minute. Then he grabs his towel and heads into the shower.


	6. I quit talking again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: anxiety, homophobia, potential dub-con (I personally don't read it that way, but I see how one could)

It’s supposed to be different when you’re in love, so Jack makes an effort to hold Bitty’s hand whenever he’s got Bitty’s dick in his mouth. Sometimes the sharp little points of Bitty’s fingernails dig into the backs of Jack’s hands, but usually Jack’s too distracted by adrenaline and oxytocin and Bitty’s guttural panting to notice until afterwards.

“You fight off ice or what?” Tater asks once, pointing at the red-brown arcs on Jack’s aching knuckles. 

“Oh,” Jack says. To his horror, he can feel the tips of his ears start to turn red. “No.”

Tater nods and taps his nose—Jack has no idea where he learned that—and stage whispers, “Is sex thing, I understand.” 

Jack’s ears turn redder. “No,” he says.

Tater wiggles his eyebrows, obviously unconvinced. “Okay, as you say.”

But it is a sex thing. A lot of things are sex things, actually: the week in November Bitty won’t talk to him, Jack’s pulled groin, the shiner Bitty gets when they accidentally roll off the bed and Bitty hits his face on Jack’s nightstand.

“Fuck,” Bitty shrieks, after that, kicking Jack off him and rushing to Jack’s terrifying fridge with the thousand settings that no one knows how to use. Jack runs after him to warn him that the ice chute is set to  _ crushed  _ because Tater wanted a smoothie and Jack never figured out how to switch it back, but Bitty’s already got an eyeful of ice shards by the time Jack gets there.

“Sorry,” Jack says. Bitty, naked and furious, punches him in the gut and collapses in a pathetic heap on the couch. 

They both  _ want  _ it to be good, and Jack can almost feel what it would be like—the molasses warmth Bitty sometimes brings into his bed when they both wake up before Jack’s alarm. Bitty kisses the back of his neck and Jack bites gently at Bitty’s wrist and for a while, wrapped up in the hush of the early morning, the strange veil between them disappears and Jack feels like Bitty’s really touching him. Then someone gets come in his ear or starts coughing on the other one’s dick and everything goes to hell.

“I’m sorry,” Jack finds himself saying, every time, increasingly desperate. “I’m trying.”

“I’m the one who’s never done this before,” Bitty snaps back, putting one of Jack’s stupid throw pillows between them as he curls in on himself.  

Jack can’t even begin to parse that, or what Bitty wants from him, so he slumps back down into the bed and stares at the ceiling. He hates sleeping on his back, but after the first tingling signs of carpal tunnel showed up it was more prudent to take the pressure off his forearms. 

“Go to sleep,” Bitty says from the other side of the bed. He’s so small and so imperious, and Jack is ravaged daily by affection for him. It isn’t fair. Jack settles his face into the pillow, ashamed, and Bitty huffs out an irritated breath. “Well, if you’re going to be like that,” he says, and before Jack can ask,  _ Like what?  _ Bitty’s removed the pillow and straddled Jack’s waist.

“Hi,” Jack tries, nonplussed.

“Shut up,” Bitty says, and through his sudden vertigo Jack is aware of a vague dread appearing at the small of his back. When Bitty smacks Jack’s hand away from settling on his hip, the dread zips up Jack’s spine and settles like a hot stone at the base of his neck. 

“I don’t—” Jack starts.

“You don’t? You don’t what, Jack?” Bitty hisses meanly, shuffling back over Jack’s reflexive half-erection and yanking his boxers down around his thighs. “You don’t think I suck your cock as well as Parse did?”

Jack is so taken aback by the sneer on Bitty’s face that he doesn’t have time to react before Bitty’s practically biting down on his dick. “What the fuck!” Jack shouts, flinching away.

Bitty lifts his head and just starts jerking him, each pull way too fast, dry and painful. “You don’t think I know what I’m doing?”

“No, Bitty—” 

But Bitty’s not listening to him, ducks his head down again and holds Jack’s dick out of the way so he can nip at the tender skin underneath. “You don’t think I’m good enough,” he insists, between bites. Jack doesn’t want to be here, in front of him, in front of Bitty’s flashing teeth. “You don’t want me.”

“What are you talking about, Bittle?” Jack roars, but Bitty stuffs a few fingers in Jack’s mouth and goes to town on his dick again. It doesn’t feel good, exactly, but even like this Jack finds he wants Bitty in whatever capacity Bitty is willing to give of himself. He bites down on Bitty’s fingers when Bitty gets too rough, and Bitty more or less listens, backs off to give Jack some breathing room.

He looks down at Jack over his nose, back very straight, all his weight right above Jack’s knees, assiduously avoiding, despite his anger, both Jack’s tender knee and the adductor he’d pulled last time Bitty tried fucking him. “You think I can’t tell?” Jack wants to talk to him, calm him down, but Bitty’s fingers are still in the way. “You think I can’t tell the way you look at me now you’re around real men all day?”

Jack shakes his head and grabs Bitty’s wrist to pull his hand away. “No, Bittle, no, that’s not what I think at all.”

“So you  _ can  _ tell and you still do it,” Bitty says, looking unimpressed, and mercilessly reaches for Jack again.

“What are we talking about,” Jack says, grabbing Bitty’s other wrist so he stops with Jack’s goddamn dick already.

“That I can’t even get you to  _ come  _ without  _ fucking it up _ ,” Bitty seethes. “That even looking like this, even after being locked in that  _ fucking _ utility closet, I can’t do the thing everyone seems to think I was made for.”

Jack is too bewildered to feel anxious, but the hot stone is spreading up the back of his skull. He’s going to have a headache once this is all over. “Looking like what?” 

“A twink, Jack!” Bitty barks out, and Jack feels his whole body freeze in dismayed surprise. Bitty’s tight above him, coiled up, one wrist in each of Jack’s palms. “My whole life I thought, well, if I’m really a cocksucker, at least I was made to suck cock.” He forces his arms out of Jack’s grip; he’s been training. “But I can’t even do that.” He takes three harsh breaths and then climbs off of Jack. “Sorry,” he says, and helps Jack pull his boxers back up.

Jack sits up. “I guess we’re both sorry, then.” Bitty’s radiating heat, and Jack wants to kiss him, hold his hand, but he doesn’t know if he’d be welcome—but fuck it; it can’t get worse than it is right now. He puts a hand on Bitty’s jittery knee. “You suck cock pretty good.”

Bitty hides his face in his hands. “Wow, thanks.”

“Maybe,” Jack offers, snorting a little, unable to stop the weak nervous giggle in the back of his throat, “maybe fewer teeth next time,” and then he’s laughing so hard his vision blurs and he feels drool start to collect on his lower lip.

“Oh my god,” he hears Bitty say distantly. “Jack—fuck, Jack, stop it—”

“I can’t,” Jack wheezes, which is how they both realize simultaneously it’s turned into a panic attack. Bitty’s eyes widen and Jack is overwhelmed with the need to get the hell out of Dodge, but the bathroom’s down the hall and Jack doesn’t know if his legs will carry him that far, so he rolls off the bed, smacks his face on the foot of his nightstand, and tries to fit his limbs, which seem to suddenly number by the dozens, into the small space between the nightstand and the wall on its other side.

Bitty doesn’t say anything while Jack rides it out, trying to abort the hyperventilation before he passes out or chokes to death. In the curious, detached part of his brain that isn’t convinced he’s dying, he can even see the Deadspin article title:  _ Pervert Wunderkind Suffocates In Own Bedroom, Probable Auto-Erotic Accident.  _ He doesn’t know if Bitty’s silent presence is better or worse than if Bitty tried to talk to him right now; better, probably, since Jack can at least pretend he’s alone. 

Eventually he talks himself down. At some point, Bitty climbed off the bed and is sitting cross-legged in front of Jack, a couple feet away. Jack’s whole body suffuses with embarrassment, but his eyes are still teary and there’s nothing he can do about it now. His head starts to throb.

“You have got to move that nightstand, honey,” Bitty says, knee-walking towards him once Jack uncrosses his arms, relaxes his leg. He reaches out, gentle. “I think it counts as a health hazard by now.”

“You might have a point,” Jack concedes, and lets Bitty take his hand. 

 


	7. god, I want to go home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gotta finish as I began: ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> many thanks to [familiar](http://archiveofourown.org/users/familiar/pseuds/familiar) and [hrhelizabethiii](http://hrhelizabethiii.tumblr.com) for helping me reach new heights of delusional Jack Zimmermann fanaticism

Bitty likes giving it to Jack from behind, which isn’t Jack’s favorite—he prefers it face-to-face with his nose tucked into the crook of Bitty’s neck. Missionary position is boring, according to the yellowing copy of  _ The Joy of Gay Sex _ Shitty had unearthed from some musty thrift store and then given to them as a wedding present. Jack is often accused of being boring, though. 

He’s making a sandwich on the first afternoon of a three-day break when Bitty comes up behind him. Bitty is unboring, so after he wraps his arms around Jack’s waist he sticks two fingers in Jack’s mouth; this is how Jack knows that Bitty wants it.  

“I’m eating,” he protests. Well, it’s not exactly a protest. Jack loves Bitty, so whenever Bitty wants something, Jack tries to give it to him. Sometimes this is inconvenient, but on the other hand Bitty’s agreed not to start the adoption process until Jack retires; there are a thousand debts between them. Jack’s therapist is trying to get him to stop thinking of relationships like bank accounts, but he doesn’t see the problem. Bank accounts have always seemed to him comfortingly honest: input, output, accumulation. 

“Fifteen minutes,” Bitty allows, pulling out his fingers and pinching the back of Jack’s neck so that Jack is marked by his own saliva. Jack wonders faintly whether Bitty will still expect him to have sex in the middle of the day once they have a baby in the house. Babies nap, so, probably. 

Jack finishes folding turkey onto the sandwich and carefully cuts it from corner to corner. They have a breakfast nook because Bitty had always dreamt of one, but Jack likes it even more than Bitty does, now, drags his feet whenever Bitty wants to sit at their formal dining table and use at least two forks; Jack prefers to sit under the kitchen skylight and knock his knees into Bitty’s underneath the pickled oak butcher block table. 

Sometimes he has to eat his sandwiches the way he did when he was a kid, corners first, then the center, then the crust, but today he doesn’t have to, which is good. Jack has been told his whole life that it is embarrassing to dissect one’s food. 

Plate in the dishwasher, hands soaped up and rinsed off, T-shirt straightened, Jack glances at the clock and sticks his head into the bedroom. “Hey, Bits.”

Bitty’s sitting on the bed and flicking through something on the iPad. “Come in, hon,” he says, not looking up as he pats the coverlet next to him. There’s already a neat stack of throw pillows on the chest at the end of the bed; Bitty won’t admit it since he’s the one with the Crate & Barrel credit card, but he hates them. 

Jack steals one of the least itchy of the pillows—it’s got blue lace on it; Bitty must see him grab it since he makes a face—and sticks it under his neck for extra support as he sinks down on his side of the bed. His left shoulder gets sore if he cricks his head up at the wrong angle unsupported. He’s giving himself another two seasons, but it might just be one. He doesn’t want to think about it so he rolls over and hides his face in Bitty’s hip.

“Pumpkin,” Bitty says, threading one hand gently through Jack’s hair. He’s hard, and when Jack glances over at the iPad he sees some sweet-lipped guy with a military haircut getting pounded by a fucking machine. 

Jack bites into one of the wrinkles of Bitty’s slacks as they watch the Marine’s face get redder and redder. Bitty hums a little to himself and turns up the volume, his thighs starting to tremble minutely. Jack lets the strange bland taste of fabric numb his tongue a little. When he feels his own face start to screw up, he opens up his tight jaw and drops his head down between Bitty’s leg and the edge of the throw pillow.

“You okay?” Bitty asks.

Jack nods. He doesn’t want Bitty to see his face; Bitty clicks his tongue but lets Jack get away with it, rubbing the hair at the nape of Jack’s neck between his fingers. 

The Marine grunts. Jack feels his breath catch in his throat. He hucks out a cough; Bitty sticks his sharp little nails into the first knob of Jack’s spine. The Marine grunts again and so does Jack, against his will, resettling his hips on the bed.

Bitty reaches over to get something from the bedside table, then sets it down on Jack’s ass—oh, the iPad stand, then the iPad down on top of it. “Don’t let that fall. I want to watch.”

Jack nods into the covers, too vigorously. He reaches back to catch the iPad before it can shatter on the floor or something equally disastrous. His thumb hits the screen and the video pauses, or at least the sound stops.

“No hands from you, mister,” Bitty says, hitting Jack’s fingers away and setting the iPad back up. Jack feels him fiddle with the screen and the faint obscene squelches start up again. 

Jack keeps his eyes closed and guesses what Bitty’s doing by sound and delicate atmospheric shifts— that sound is Bitty unzipping his slacks, then the rustle of reaching inside his briefs, then an unexpected pain as he accidentally knees Jack in the side.

“Oops,” he says, a little high-pitched. “Sorry, honey.”

It would probably be polite to respond, but Jack’s too busy worrying about what Bitty’s doing, whether he was readjusting or whether he was pulling his pants off. He could find out; he visualizes opening his eyes, blinking as he gets used to light again. But he just—doesn’t want to. 

Some part of the fucking machine must pick up into high gear because there’s a strange whir buzzing tinnily through the speakers. The Marine yowls a couple times, and Bitty huffs out a labored breath. He’s got to be working himself with one hand, given the bed’s slight shakes, and the other hand has latched back onto the back of Jack’s neck, squeezing in a regular pulse. 

It’s pretty good to be lying here, with Bitty sighing out glottal stops next to him, the vibrations of the iPad’s speakers flying down through him in tiny, pleasurable shivers. Jack wonders again about the baby. Bitty wants a little girl, and Jack guesses he does too. He thinks about putting fragile pink bows in her hair, the Mary Janes his mother will surely purchase for them by the dozen. 

They don’t know how they’re going to do it, yet. Jack had agreed to adoption, but Bitty still brings up sperm donorship—sometimes it’s just supposed to be sexy, Bitty with his hand wrapped around Jack and his eyebrows raised expectantly, but sometimes it sounds like he’s really thinking about it. Jack doesn’t want to come into a plastic cup, though. 

“Fuck,” Bitty says. He digs his nails into Jack’s neck, not plastic at all, although Bitty indulged in drugstore acrylics when Lardo came over to celebrate the twentieth season premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’d taken a week for the glue to dry up; Lacroix, Jack’s usual roommate, had caught a glimpse of Bitty gesticulating with his red talons over Skype one night and had been scrupulously, terribly polite to Jack ever since. “Fuck, Jack, do you hear this?”

Jack hadn’t been paying attention, but he zones back in. The Marine is screeching, the machine whirring away industriously. It’s not a pleasant or even an erotic sound, but Bitty’s clearly getting something out of it, so Jack tries to, too, tries to imagine what Bitty likes about it. The machine itself he understands. It’s the yelling he doesn’t like.

“Oh my god,” Bitty groans, moving his hand down to hang onto the point of Jack’s shoulder blade, squeezing harder than he had been. It hurts, although less than it might have since Bitty’s palms are sweaty and he’s having trouble keeping his grip. It sounds like Bitty pulled out the lube at some point, too, the wet slap of his hand in a counterpoint with the Marine’s lengthy orgasmic keen.

The baby’s going to cry a lot. It’s what babies do. Jack has practiced listening to videos of babies online but so far the wailing still leaves him on edge, like his nerve endings are grinding together. He still has a couple years—well, at least a year, and adoptions are supposed to take a long time.

Bitty knocks the iPad off of Jack’s ass onto the bed and crawls over him, his knees squeezing Jack’s thighs together, one hand still a pincer on Jack’s shoulder blade. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chants breathlessly, close enough to Jack that the back of his hand knocks against Jack’s spine with every pump of his fist. “Fuck!”

He comes on Jack and smears it in as he does so, maybe on purpose, maybe just scrabbling for purchase. With Bitty, it can be hard to tell. Meanwhile, the Marine sounds like he’s had it, reduced to heavy, damp-sounding breaths as the machine buzzes on. 

“Oh my god,” Bitty says in a long, satisfied drawl.

Jack is hard, still, but he doesn’t want to look up yet. “Can you turn off the video?”

“What? Oh, sure, baby.” Bitty rests for a little while, sighing directly onto his cooling jizz, before sitting back on Jack’s thighs and pausing the video. The room’s thrown into silence, suddenly, only Bitty’s breathing and the blood pumping in Jack’s ears left over from before. Bitty stretches out on top of him, weighing him down a little. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Jack decides. 

“You want to come?”

He considers. He’s uncomfortable, but despite Bitty’s probable ambitions, they’re not going to be able to have sex whenever they want for the rest of their lives. “No, that’s okay.” Bitty kisses the back of his head and Jack feels abruptly able to lift it from the bedcovers, cranes his neck around and lifts his face.

“There you are!” Bitty exclaims, sounding delighted, and kisses him on the cheek. “I was missing you.”

“I’m here,” Jack says; “I think I’ve been here the whole time.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [come hang on tumblr! ](http://tomatowrites.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
> ETA: oh my god, I'm so sorry for the wild essays I wrote in the comments section???


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